Key Steps to Putting Together a Business Continuity Plan

July 07, 2015
by Alex Collins, IT Services Consultant

Can your organization afford to suffer an hour of IT system downtime? Consider the costs of an outage: about $100,000 an hour for the vast majority of enterprises, if a 2013 survey by ITIC is to be believed. For many small- and medium-scale companies, six figures an hour is way above what they can afford.

Fortunately, the solution is simple and surprisingly affordable: a business continuity plan that helps keep your business running in the event of unscheduled interruptions to normal operations. Whether the reasons are as mundane as a broken-down heating system in winter or as extreme as Hurricane Sandy, having a plan to deal with downtime has become more important than ever - because the costs of any outage are the same, whatever the cause.

At All Covered, we've had plenty of experience creating business continuity plans for clients of all sizes. We advise our clients to walk through the following steps:

Assess the impact of downtime on your business

How prepared is your enterprise for unscheduled downtime? Different companies have different tolerances; some can stand to be offline for up to a day, while others require system restoration in a matter of minutes.

Any continuity solution takes all this into account: how long your business can function without data, which employees need access to your data the most, and how recent the data copy needs to be.

Downtime can be particularly deadly for your bottom line if an outage threatens your company's compliance with applicable regulations. Our legal and compliance experts assist clients in reviewing those specific risks and the applicable solutions.

Tailor your plan according to your needs

No two continuity plans should look the same: your own plan should be tailored to your risk profile, and address your particular needs. Clients of All Covered can pick from a menu of solutions, tied together with a comprehensive, customizable plan that merges them into a seamless unit.

Clients can start with our Backup for Servers service that uses a combination of local backup, cloud backup, and object-level Exchange restore to reduce business interruptions to a minimum. If uninterrupted uptime is important to your business, our Business Continuity service can virtualize your entire business remotely, allowing you access to your IT environment even when your own servers are physically destroyed.

Test the plan continuously

Does your plan have continuing, evolving support after it's set up? Our clients do. We constantly conduct loss-of-service simulations to see how well your plan holds up under DefCon 1 scenarios... and adjust them as needed. All Covered continuously works behind the scenes, monitoring and fine-tuning our clients' backup as their individual requirements evolve.

The All Covered Difference

With a partner like All Covered by your side, you can implement a customized business continuity plan that will keep you afloat through any emergency. Human error? Force majeure? Just bring it.

Your Trusted Technology Partner

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